Bob Dylan Said the Press Always Misrepresented Him
TL;DR:
- Bob Dylan has a reputation for valuing his privacy.
- Bob Dylan said the press does not paint an honest picture of him.
- In the 1960s, Bob Dylan stepped away from public life entirely.
Bob Dylan has lived under the scrutiny of the press and the public for longer than he lived outside it. Despite this, he has managed to keep many elements of his life private. This doesn’t mean he stays entirely out of the public eye, though. Dylan has given hundreds of lengthy interviews since he rose to prominence in the 1960s. Still, though, he said that the media often misrepresents him.
The musician is notoriously private
The value Dylan places on his private life is apparent to those who know him, so much so that his concert promoter instructed tour staff not to speak to him.
“Before we went out, I got the whole tour staff together in San Francisco and I said, ‘You know, this is Bob Dylan,’” promoter Bill Graham wrote in the book Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock and Out. “‘I don’t think he’s the kind of guy who wants you to say to him every day, ‘Hi, Bob! How you doin’? What’s goin’ on?’ Please try to understand that and give him some respect for his privacy.”
Even for Dylan, though, this may have been too much privacy.
“The tour started,” Graham wrote. “In the third or fourth city in the middle of the night, someone knocked on the door of my hotel room. I opened the door and it was Bob. He came in. I could see he had a problem. I said, ‘Is everything OK, Bob? Something’s wrong?’ He said, ‘Bill. Why isn’t anybody talking to me?’”
Bob Dylan said he doesn’t often agree with the portrait the press paints of him
In many interviews, Dylan has spoken at length about music, religion, and his contemporaries. Still, he does not share too much of himself with the press, likely because he doesn’t appreciate the way they’ve represented him over the years. He would prefer to express himself through his music.
“The press has always misrepresented me,” he said, per the book The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait by Daniel Mark Epstein. “They refuse to accept what I am and what I do. They always sensationalize and blow things up … It makes me feel better to write one song than talk to a thousand journalists.”
According to Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz, Dylan began to view the press as “parasitic” early in his career.
“He was the artist,” Wilentz told the Columbia Journalism Review. “All the press could do is feed off of him. And when they were done with you, they’ll spit you out into the gutter. It happened with [Jack] Kerouac. They could destroy you if you let them.”
Bob Dylan once stepped away press and the public eye
In 1966, Dylan crashed his motorcycle near his home in Woodstock, New York. While recovering from the accident, he retreated entirely from the public eye.
“I had been in a motorcycle accident and I’d been hurt, but I recovered,” he wrote in his 2004 memoir Chronicles. “Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race.”
He used the escape from fame to spend time with his family.
“Then, I had that motorcycle accident, which put me outta commission,” he told Rolling Stone in 1992. “Then, when I woke up and caught my senses, I realized I was just working for all these leeches. And I didn’t want to do that. Plus, I had a family, and I just wanted to see my kids.”
